A Petri-Net-Based Approach for Enhancing Clinical Reasoning in Medical Education

Medical students are called to acquire competence to manage disease in its dynamic evolution over time, learning to analyze how clinical conditions evolve in a patient's history and how each condition interferes with the evolution of the other coexisting conditions. In this article, the health issue network (HIN) approach is introduced as a formal language based on Petri nets (PNs) to model properties that are particularly apposite for the graphical representation of HIN evolutionary paths. Moreover, the PNs’ underlying mathematical model allows users to draw coherent and well-formed graphs representing rather complex clinical cases. Finally, HIN can be easily integrated into a simulation environment to support case-based learning activities and assessment. The examples of the exercises provided in this article show, on the one hand, the ways the introduced methodology is figured out and implemented; on the other hand, they outline the variety of learning questions that users may deal with when deploying the HIN approach.